Category Archives: Academic

About two months ago, I made my perfect timetable for the 2008-09 academic year (which still hasn’t been upset by other people taking my spot — yet). With three English and one Chinese per term, and a science course in the first, that only leaves me enough space to select one elective for term 2.

Oh, the choices! After thinking about it for hundreds of minutes, I’ve narrowed my options down to six:

Anthropology 321: The Canadian Far West in Prehistory (Buchanan), MWF 9:00-10:00
Because I love cavemen and women and always want to know more about them. Because I also love British Columbia. Hopefully this is far west enough to include this love.

Central, Near Eastern and Religious Studies 307: Theories of Myth (Chem/Geog), TuTh 11:00-12:30
An examination of the origin, nature, transmission and interpretation of myths in the Western tradition, looking at theorists such as Freud and Jung.

Anthropology 303B: Ethnography of Special Areas (AnSo), MWF 3:00-4:00
In this case, studying the European Union and the challenges it faces, including ethnic conflict, historical memory, and the construction of national identity. (For some reason, Genevieve passed across my mind while I was looking at this.)

Religious Studies 306: Archaeology and the Bible (Neville Scarfe), MWF 3:00-4:00
Because I’m curious as to how these two interact with one another. Also because in IB, we did a mock history assessment of The Da Vinci Code. I rather hated that, particularly the accepting Dan Brown as a verifiable historical source. What.

Anthropology 202A: Contemporary Social Problems (AnSo Building), TuTh 3:30-5:00
While the prof is supposed to be good — actually, the profs of all these courses are supposed to be good according to RateMyProfs — the course doesn’t specify which region is being studied, and I can’t find it anywhere. Boo!

Sociology 240A: Introduction to Social Interaction (LSK), TuTh 3:30-5:00
Because I love people in general and am always interested in how they function, particularly when interacting with one another. I actually wanted to do some other Sociology and/or Family Studies courses but none of those fit in my timetable, so this is the closest I can get to those two.

Six courses for one spot: talk about competition.

This little gem of a site is one of my essential tools in course-planning. Oh, making sure your courses all fit into one schedule is important, of course, but I enjoy putting in the extra effort of choosing hopefully good profs and still making a schedule that fits. It takes more time, but it’s well worth the effort to actually enjoy going to class for three or four months, I think.

The website is not the first thing I look at, though. The first thing I do when planning my schedule is to select the classes I want which only have one course offering (in my case, Chinese). Obvious statement, perhaps, but it’s good to see what slots are definitely going to be filled on my worklist. (I also have this craving for two hour lunch breaks whenever possible.)

Then I look at my requirements for English or for whatever subjects I want to do, and look at the courses to see which meet those requirements. Often there are multiple courses, let alone multiple course offerings, to pick from. And here is where the website comes in.

Look for course that fits time, look up prof. Only the smiley faces make it to the list. If there are multiple smiley faces, I read the comments. A lot of students like the professors who will give easy marks, which isn’t what I’m looking for. Many say, “It’s too hard!” and I wonder if it’s really too hard or if it’s all relative to how hard someone’s willing to work. We’re all looking for slightly different experiences, after all. But the other thing I like to do is to select the professor with the smiley face and lots of ratings: I’ll probably pick the good professor with 70 ratings as opposed to the good professor with 10. Mathematically speaking, the higher the total rating, the less impact the anomalies have upon said total rating. Therefore, more ratings = more likely to really be good. Interestingly enough, all the professors other students have recommended to me thus far have many happy golden faced ratings.

But I think it’s a good thing to keep in mind that this site is by no means the be all and end all of course-planning. In fact, I think it would be remarkably silly to expect that your professor will be good simply because they have a good rating on the site. You can hope that they’re good, but it’s not a guarantee. Using this site simply ups the odds in your favour of getting a good prof, as opposed to taking any old course that fits into your timetable. In addition, I have the luxury of picking profs because I study subjects that have enormous departments, so I can choose. Sometimes there isn’t a choice, and when there isn’t, there isn’t any point in griping about it either.

Another thing to note is that when I talk about good profs, I mean they are professors who really challenge your thinking and who will really make you work hard — but not ridiculously so. At least, I don’t think it ridiculous: I usually take a while to work out a way in which to manage my time and my readings, but by the end of term, I’m managing just fine. And I personally think that the point of making your own timetable is to do classes you are interested in and in which you will learn a lot. I don’t belong to the school of thought that calls for choosing only classes that will boost your GPA, though I understand why it’s nice to have those classes sometimes. (I think one “easy” class per term is quite the limit for me, though I had a very happy term last term without any at all.)

But alas! Professors can’t choose their students, the poor dears.

I woke up this morning feeling as well as six hours of bad dreams can afford me, with the realization that my registration is not simply a timing problem, but I can’t register for most of my courses period. The system puts me at 2nd year standing. It will block me from anything that asks for 3rd year.

Baaa.

On the really happy side of things, I just got into 3rd year Honours. I’m so glad. Also so concerned about this awful twist.

Baaa to red tape!

My registration date is now out on the SSC and I’ve discovered the system thinks I’m entering second-year. This answers one of my questions — it does not, apparently, add on the credits that I get over summer term. Kind of not cool for me as it pretty much guarantees all the classes I want will be full by the time all the third- and fourth-year students are done registering.

I’ve emailed one of the Arts Academic Advisors and hope to hear from her soon (the sooner the better). By the way, I want to share a very cool feature that Angeli shared with me: the UBC Directory. It’s a very neat, non-paper-wasting resource that allows you to look up faculty members and staff, or organisational units like Arts Academic Advising, which is what we did.